I want to talk about Lady
Susan in the context of epistolary
novels written by women earlier in the eighteenth century – not
novels you’ve ever heard of, probably, but those Austen herself
might have read. But I’ll start with a glance at Northanger
Abbey, where Henry Tilney explains to
wide-eyed Catherine Morland the inadequacies of female letter
writers: “it appears to me that the usual style of
letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars
…. A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to
stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.” Although she
responds with some pique, Catherine has given Henry his opening by
observing “doubtingly” herself, “I have sometimes
thought … whether ladies do write so much better letters than
gentlemen! That is – I should not think the superiority was
always on our side.”1
At roughly the same time that she wrote Northanger
Abbey, of course, Austen was probably
also working on the novel later to be published as Lady
Susan – a fiction composed of
letters, mainly by women, demonstrating no deficiencies of subject,
grammar, or energy.

“Now however, we begin to mend; our party is
enlarged by Mrs. Vernon’s brother,
a handsome young Man, who
promises me some amusement” (MW, 254).
Illustration by Doris
Rosenquist for “Lady Susan.”

The conventional view of Lady
Susan has it that Austen wrote
awkwardly in the epistolary style. (“It did not really suit her
talents,” Margaret Drabble explains.2)
Although Austen may have drafted early versions of Sense
and Sensibility and Pride
and Prejudice in letters, her published
work composed after Lady Susan
never again employs the mode. Yet by playing with epistolary
convention in Lady Susan,
I want to argue, Austen located herself in a female tradition,
demonstrating subversive possibilities of a form that in previous
uses by English women had reinforced literary and social restrictions
on female enterprise. Earlier novels in letter form hint resentment
and depression about the female situation, but they implicitly accept
that situation as necessary. Lady Susan
realizes the possibility of a woman’s exercising agency –
partly by the act of writing letters. The novel’s innovative
force becomes apparent by comparison with preceding letter-fictions.

As Humpty Dumpty explains in Through
the Looking-Glass, all use of language
raises questions of mastery. Lady Susan quite understands.
“Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of
Language,” she writes, “as Admiration waits on Beauty.”3
Lady Susan means that she’s a good talker, but the letter form
emphasizes how she controls reality also by her written
representations of it. Lady Susan’s vigorous antagonist, her
brother-in-law’s wife Mrs. Vernon, suspects her opponent’s
integrity precisely because of her linguistic deftness: “she
talks vastly well, I am afraid of being ungenerous or I should say
she talks too
well to feel so very deeply” (Letter 15, MW,
267). The representation of Susan as a woman who gains power by
avoiding the trap of conventional “feminine” emotion
raises important questions about the relative value of mastery and of
feeling.

Lady Susan speaks and writes perpetually about
feeling but typically claims emotions quite different from those she
experiences. The short letter that opens the novel epitomizes her
mastery and her implicit mockery of orthodox feeling and expression,
as she invites herself to her brother-in-law’s house and
announces her hope there “to be introduced to a Sister whom I
have so long desired to be acquainted with” and her impatience
to be “admitted into your delightful retirement.” “I
long to be made known to your dear little Children,” Lady Susan
continues, “in whose hearts I shall be very eager to secure an
interest” (MW,
243-44).

This letter supplies some facts: Lady Susan is determined to visit
the Vernons; she will leave her daughter in London. It also contains
misstatements, although the reader cannot yet know this. Lady
Susan’s real reasons for departing from her previous retreat
involve not the reluctance to engage in active social life that she
asserts, but her excessive social activity: she has created a
scandal, severely testing the “hospitable & chearful
dispositions” she attributes to her friends, that makes her
departure imperative. Despite her claims, she feels neither “Duty”
nor “affection” toward her daughter, who impedes her
social freedom. She wants to visit Churchill not from eagerness to
meet Mrs. Vernon but because she has nowhere else to go.

Before learning these facts, the reader may intuit the letter’s
falseness from its insistent emotional clichés. The
repertoire of attitudes here invoked – wishes for attachment,
need for solitude, longing for “delightful retirement,”
love for a daughter, interest in the “dear little Children”
of others – belongs to the stereotypical lady of sensibility.
Lady Susan recklessly, mockingly, multiplies acceptable emotional
postures. Mrs. Vernon suspects her falseness without knowing how to
resist.

I dwell on this first letter because it epitomizes
Austen’s daring in imagining her central character. In the
1790s, when Austen presumably wrote the book, the woman of
sensibility, although sometimes criticized, was a virtually sacred
stock figure. As a female letter writer in a novel published in 1789
puts it, “Poor Clara! she had always a tender and susceptible
heart, which seldom fails of subjecting its possessor to many a
severe pang: yet, who would wish to be destitute of sensibility?”4
Austen answers that question. Lady Susan sees sensibility as
weakness, manipulates its vocabulary, and avoids its substance. She
feels contemptuous toward her daughter, who indulges in feeling
rather than exercises control. For Lady Susan herself, artifices of
emotion supply instruments for domination. Real
feeling must be denied, suppressed, disguised.

Yet real feeling – though hardly the kind
associated with “sensibility” – rings through
Susan’s letters, especially those written to her confidante,
Mrs. Johnson, which vividly convey aggressiveness and will to power.
Lady Susan’s second letter, to Mrs. Johnson, reveals what
remained hidden in the first. Now, when she uses a phrase like “the
sacred impulse of maternal affection,” she dramatizes her rage:
“if [my] Daughter were not the greatest simpleton on Earth, I
might have been rewarded for my Exertions as I ought” (MW,
245). She urges Mrs. Johnson to keep up her husband’s
resentment against Mrs. Manwaring, declares that her brother-in-law
“Charles Vernon is my aversion” (246), acknowledges that
she will never pay the bill at her daughter’s new school.
“There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit,”
she writes in a later letter (Letter 7, MW,
254). Her accounts of her relations with Reginald, Mrs. Vernon’s
brother, formulate their exchanges as a struggle for mastery. Toward
the novel’s end, she suggests that she understands all
relationships as contests of power. “I am tired of submitting
my will to the Caprices of others,” she writes, declaring her
determination to triumph (Letter 39, MW,
308).

Her pose of bravado, preserved with her closest
friend, denies some emotional realities to reveal others. At this
point in the narrative, most of Susan’s plans have failed;
instead of acknowledging defeat, she rapidly shifts ground. Her
correspondent’s persona resembles hers: when Mrs. Johnson
explains that they can no longer write each other, her letter
announcing the loss of Susan’s one important alliance
concludes, off-handedly, “I dare say you did all for the best,
& there is no defying Destiny” (Letter 38, MW,
307). These women have established new conventions for themselves,
rules that govern their correspondence as other rules control Lady
Susan’s decorous overtures in her initial letter to the
Vernons. Their self-protective personae allow no expression of
tenderness, grief, regret, melancholy: sensibility.

Austen calls attention to the necessary artifice
of letters, their participation in established decorums that make
conduits for impermissible feeling. Mrs. Vernon’s aggressive
impulses find respectable expression in her desire for the good of
her family and ultimately in her wish to help Frederica (thus foiling
Lady Susan); Lady Susan’s aggression constantly seeks
acceptable forms. By writing, these women mobilize their forces,
internal and external: they provide rhetorics of self-justification,
make plans of action, record and interpret events in ways that help
them decide what to do next. Writing becomes a form of agency. Even
as facts close in on Lady Susan (“Facts are such horrid
things!” Mrs. Johnson rightly observes: Letter 32, MW,
303), she insists that her control of language will make all right:
“Do not torment yourself with fears on my account. Depend upon
it, I can make my own story good with Reginald” (Letter 33, MW,
303).

She is wrong. No longer can she deceive Reginald; no longer can she
even manipulate her daughter. With few financial resources, few
friends, no family of her own, an alienated set of inlaws, she has no
obvious recourse. From the beginning of the narrative her social
situation has been precarious – and not altogether as a result
of her wickedness. Her verbal aplomb disguises the bleakness of
social and personal actuality for a woman destitute of profitable
alliance. By sheer style she plays with reality. This aspect of her
letter writing differentiates her not only from self-righteous Mrs.
Vernon but from other epistolary “heroines" before and
after her. Indeed, her tenuous claim to the title of heroine rests
almost entirely on her style of self-presentation, by which she
demands the attention of others within and outside the text.”
Here’s an example of her rhetorical self-assertion:

At present my Thoughts are
fluctuating between various schemes. I have many things to compass,
I must punish Frederica, & pretty severely too, for her
application to Reginald; I must punish him for receiving it so
favourably, & for the rest of his conduct. I must torment my
Sister-in-law for the insolent triumph of her Look & Manner since
Sir James has been dismissed … & I must make myself amends
for the humiliations to which I have stooped within these few days.
To effect all this I have various plans (Letter 25, MW,
293-94).

However
harshly we condemn her “various plans,” it’s hard
not to admire her resilience.

To read earlier epistolary novels by women makes
you realize how brilliantly Austen transformed her predecessors’
preoccupations. Every major formal and thematic issue raised by Lady
Susan appears frequently in earlier
female fictions, but in a different key. Particularly interesting
are the concerns central to Austen’s novel: problems of female
power and of feeling, possibilities for women of writing as action.
Although the earlier works, now almost entirely forgotten, contain no
such aggressive female characters as Lady Susan, their plots suggest
women’s resentful internalization of social norms.

Eighteenth-century epistolary novels by women
often assert the impossibility of saying what one means – or
feels. “I am provoked at this natural incapacity of conveying
my sentiments to you; words are but a cloak, or rather a clog, to our
ideas,” one fictional letter writer complains.5
Characters within novels apologize for the badness of their own
writing styles in comparison with the grace of others’
writing.6
Writers faced with the task of narrating intense experience often
tell us their stories can’t be told. My favourite example
comes from a work called Female
Stability. “The particulars of
the former [scene] I cannot describe,” a woman character
writes, “but the latter, not being so very interesting, I will
endeavour at.”7
If these novelists do not altogether confine themselves to the
uninteresing, they certainly avoid conspicuous forms of emotional
drama: proposal scenes, for instance. One exemplary young woman
character announces her “distaste” for “romantic”
novelistic accounts of proposals, explaining that she will “therefore
only observe, that Mr. Dormer made the offer of his person and
fortune in a manly, sensible, and delicate manner; and concluded with
requesting my permission to make application to my father”
(Timbury, 1:156-57). Mr. Dormer sounds rather like Emma, who of
course says just what she ought, as a lady always does.

But fictional correspondents who draw back from
scenes of intense emotion worry about confining themselves to trivia.
“I am seriously considering,” one young woman writes
another, “whether or not I can find anything to amuse you,
which I have not repeated to you five hundred times.”8
She then summarizes the daily events of her life, none of them
justifying a written record. What can one write letters about?
The female novelist has the same problem: daily life, the life she
knows, lacks substance and interest as matter for public
communication.

Two solutions emerge. Private letters may acquire
interest by reporting sensational episodes, usually from other
people’s experience. One novelistic letter writer expresses
explicitly her hope that the story she tells will “be a means
of dispelling for awhile, the ennui of [another woman’s] very
solitary life.”9
Stories fight boredom. Within the nominally “realistic”
context of letters, novelists therefore allow themselves to construct
lurid romance sequences.

Other writers solve the problem of subject simply
by assigning high value to feeling itself, however slight its causes.
Letters, in all these works, provide outlets for emotion. In
Felicia to Charlotte,
an early novel largely devoid of developed happenings, Felicia
announces at the outset that she plans “to discover all the
secret folds of my heart, and to unbosom myself to you without the
least reserve.”10
The promise of emotional revelation is self-justifying.

Both uses of letters – as repositories for
story, as registers of feeling – bear directly on issues of
plot; the artifice that creates stories out of happenings.
Epistolary novels reinforce feeling as female vocation by
substituting notations of emotion for other kinds of happening and by
making feeling the cause for all effects in the outer as well as the
inner world. Feeling constitutes power rather than weakness, these
works maintain. Emotional capacity testifies to female goodness.
Here is a male character’s description of his beloved: “As
her mind has been adorned, not warped, by education, it is just what
her appearance promises: artless, gentle, timid, soft, sincere,
compassionate; awake to all the finer impressions of tenderness, and
melting with pity for every human woe.”11
Artless, gentle, timid, soft, sincere, compassionate, melting:
the perfect woman. (It must be added that male letter writers
imagined by woman authors in their own idealized image also melt at
others’ woes.)

The characters in these books feel
rather than do.
Lady Susan’s fictional predecessors write letters to
communicate facts or feelings but usually not to make anything
happen. Yet they exercise their own kind of force. Fictional
correspondences suggest how feeling can substitute for action to
generate its own kind of plot. One woman character writes another,
“To any one but my Lucy, the enclosed narrative would afford
little entertainment; it is not a series of events, but a continued
conflict of the mind, and is a history of passions, not of persons”
(Griffith, 2:160). Most eighteenth-century epistolary novels by
women indeed record passion rather than character. Woman novelists
claim competence as their women characters do: in summoning,
accepting, creating emotion. Thus feeling is
dong.

Consider this paradigmatic little story, contained
in the opening letter of a novel called The
Male Coquet: “Poor Lucy Seymour
was an unhappy instance of the fatal effects of platonic love. From
supposing that she felt nothing more than friendship for the
agreeable Mr. Selby, her heart was irretrievably lost before she was
sensible of her danger: and, to complete this misfortune, the
destroyer of her peace was on the point of marriage with her most
intimate friend. The last time I heard any thing of her, she was
supposed to be in a deep decline” (Timbury, 1:12).

The novel’s reader, too, hears nothing of
Lucy Seymour beyond her decline. Lucy is endowed with no individual
character; the figures who write the novel’s letters reveal
little more specificity; the asserted passion, recorded in a kind of
shorthand, seems as unpersuasive as the character. Telling
rather than showing,
this tiny story (like the novel it inhabits, like many other novels)
violates a fundamental principle of writing we teach to freshmen.
For two centuries critics have accordingly explained the curious
emptiness of such narrative as the product of authorial ineptitude.
Yet episodes of this sort, in all their bareness, supply fables of
the female condition.

Although these novels contain elements of “the
traditional narrative of resolution,” in which events gradually
work themselves out – as in Pride
and Prejudice, for example – they
also exemplify what Seymour Chatman calls “the modern plot of
revelation,” in which “a state of affairs is revealed.”12
Different happenings reveal remarkably similar “states of
affairs”: men betray women, women go into declines, varied
events reiterate the same assumed yet painful realities. The female
condition involves deprivation and offers cause for despair. The
emotional notation of countless flatly rendered episodes underlines
that despair.

The novelistic “history of passions”
covers a limited emotional range. Love
accounts for many consequences good and bad. Its force reduces
strong men to emotional dependence and elevates women to heroic
status. It justifies anger (always rendered as the product of sexual
jealousy) and grief. It creates women’s fates.

Yet it’s not always so simple to tell how
we’re supposed to feel about love. What are we to make, for
example, of this male rhapsody (the male in question imagined by a
woman) on love’s power? “[W]hen inspired by a worthy
object, [love] leads to every thing that is great and noble: warmed
by the desire of being approved by her, there is nothing I would not
attempt. I will to-day write to my father for his consent, and
embark immediately for the army” (Brooke, 69). The lover,
however, neither writes to his father nor embarks for the army: he
only talks about his exalted feelings. What should we make of a plot
in which, after page upon page of vapid outpourings about love, a
bride discovers that her doting husband has fathered an illegitimate
child by a woman who crept into his bed one night? He never bothered
to mention this episode, nor does he appear to feel guilty about it,
since he thought the woman only a chambermaid. When he rather
perfunctorily asks his wife’s forgiveness, she points out that
a woman in a comparable situation would never be pardoned; then she
forgives him.13
What else can she do? What can we make, finally, of the fact that
these plots generated by love record mainly disaster, often caused by
male lust and self-indulgence?

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex
(it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of
loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone” (Austen,
NA and P,
235). Anne Elliott, in Austen’s Persuasion,
speaks these bleak words. Her complexity of tone – ruefulness,
self-congratulation, hints of resentment – sums up many women’s
novels. Imagined letters in these texts stress misery and the need
to endure it, and suggest pride as well as anger. One can only guess
how much social criticism these structures of feeling imply.

Happening and feeling of course are closely
related, in fiction as in life. The stories for which fictional
letters claim attention differentiate these books from the
eighteenth-century novels we have agreed to call major
precisely by their emotional weight. Almost all important novels of
eighteenth-century England have a comic structure. They end in
marriage and in financial security. Along the road to final success,
nothing terrible happens. Tom Jones appears to have gone to bed with
his mother, but he hasn’t really; Matthew Bramble (in Humphry
Clinker) almost drowns, but not quite;
Tristram Shandy converts a squashed nose into comedy.

My epistolary novels aren’t like that. In
Susannah Gunning’s Barford Abbey,
for instance, the heroine’s guardian dies at the novel’s
start. The protagonist endures smallpox and near-rape; her lover
nearly dies from grief. More dramatically, Jane Marshall’s
History of Alicia Montague
subjects its heroine to desperate poverty as well as severe sexual
threats and almost universal rejection, by family and friends. And
most of these novels do not provide happy endings after their
disasters. Agnes De-Courci,
A Domestic Tale has a plot too
intricate to summarize, including complicated tales of sexual deceit
and manipulation and ending in narrowly averted incest, the madness
and death of the heroine, and the suicide of her lover. In The
Male Coquet, one of the two female
protagonists marries, but the other dies, betrayed by a man. The
History of Lady Julia Mandeville, a
popular work, not only concludes in the deaths of Julia and her lover
Harry; it implicitly attributes responsibility for those deaths to
the system of patriarchy. Harry’s father, who praises the
British constitution, the British royal family, and the happiness of
“virtuous industry” (Brooke, 27), imitates the national
order he admires by arranging his son’s life in every detail.
His arrangements precipitate the catastrophe.

Both as “narratives of resolution” and as “plots of
revelation,” epistolary novels by women insist on cause and
effect: sometimes on remarkably simple conceptions of final cause –
male lust, love, parental dominance. But intricate epistolary
structures deliberately obscure the novels’ systems of
causality. Plots centre on the dilemmas of young men and women
forced into present misery by unknown happenings in the past. What
they don’t know hurts them. The work of fictional
correspondences is to unravel not such relatively benign secrets as
the engagement of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, but bitter
secrets of illegitimacy, jealousy, lust, and power. To discover the
past emphasizes powerlessness in the present. As letters accumulate
to make a story, they tell, typically, of the painful weight of
personal history, the inescapability of the past.

In this group of novels, no love letters appear. Letters between
women, between men, or between relatives evoke scant sense of
intimacy. Story-telling and assertion of feeling replace the
evocation of character and relationship that we normally expect in
private letters fictional or literal. The use of letters itself thus
helps to emphasize the sense of things gone wrong. Letters, those
images of connection, here only dramatize connection’s
impossibilities.

Should one connect the special aspects of these
novels – their dark tone; intricate, malevolent plots; emphasis
on the power of families and of the past; substitution of feeling
for doing,
employment of letters more for narrative than for evocation of
relationship – should one connect such aspects with the gender
of their authors? Perhaps there lies concealed in these texts a
peculiarly female version of social criticism, veiled reaction to the
impoverished lives, the limited power, to which most women were
doomed. Male as well as female characters suffer in these novels;
but the generating vision belongs to women. The darkness of that
vision, the incursion of darkness even into so bland a plot as that
of Felicia to Charlotte
… possibly that darkness derives from female consciousness of
female actualities. One can only speculate.

In the context of these novels, Lady
Susan becomes the more remarkable for
its openness. The plot of Austen’s novel derives not from
revelations of the past but from a powerful woman’s operations
within the time scheme defined by the letters that narrate events.
Lady Susan occupies herself mainly in plotting. Although her plots
do not work out as she intends, she yet generates her own narrative.
Never does her determination to control events weaken. Her verbal
activity, oral and written, constantly remakes her history; letters
provide for her a means of force rather than of passivity. She
refuses to accept the power of the past, refuses to acknowledge,
except as verbal form, the sacred ties of motherhood. Aware of the
conventionality of convention, as none of its previous fictional
victims is, she can turn it to her own ends. For her, story is
something you make rather than something that happens to you.

What an act of liberation, to imagine the bad
mother not as inescapable nightmare but as centre of consciousness,
responsible for herself, capable of being defeated! Bad mothers in
earlier fiction are represented from the child’s point of view.
Indeed, even almost two centuries after Lady
Susan, few novelists have fully evoked
a parent’s perspective. (In our imaginations, we all remain
children.) Lady Susan exists as a sketched rather than a fully
developed character. Fully developed, she might become intolerable –
might arouse too much fear and guilt in novelist and reader alike.
In Austen’s representation, her self-interested acts have no
long-range devastating consequences. If she almost lures Reginald
into marriage and almost destroys her daughter’s happiness and
almost takes a man from his wife, she yet misses all these
achievements, not by the arrangement of Providence but largely
because of the verbal effectiveness of women she has scorned.
Reginald, the man Susan wants, believes a wronged wife’s story
and abandons his temptress. Susan’s daughter, whom the reader
probably thinks as negligible a creature as her mother believes her,
wins Reginald’s heart through the intervention of his mother
and his sister. Lady Susan must marry the rich fool she chose for
her daughter.

A very
rich fool, though. Like the conclusions of Austen’s later
novels, this ending carries a sting in its tail. Its subtle poetic
justice simultaneously rewards Lady Susan with the wealth and status
her society values and punishes her by depriving her of the male wit
and style she herself values. The huddled up form of the conclusion,
with its retreat from the epistolary, parodies the ineptitudes of
such earlier works as The History of
Alicia Montague, which recurrently
abandons the artifice of letters for the sake of narrative economy.
But the narrator’s playfulness not only asserts a new kind of
verbal mastery but extends to conventional assumptions about the
relative power of parents and children: the cruel mother meets the
fate she has ordained for her daughter. Lady Susan, of course, will
know how to control Sir James as her daughter could not. This is not
a “sad” ending even for the mother, though it carries
overtones of bitterness about the social necessities that require
Susan’s marriage.

Eighteenth-century epistolary novels by women are
hard to come by now. The only example of the genre most people know
is Fanny Burney’s Evelina
– a work different from the others in virtually all respects,
and far less disturbing than fictions that openly question the
benignity of families and the possibility of carefree marriage.
Their troubling message of despair and their demonstration of female
ineffectuality may have ensured the disappearance of other epistolary
works; perhaps Evelina
survives because it appears more innocent. However disturbing the
female epistolary tradition, though, however angry and despairing its
fictional arrangements, its novels reinforced the status quo by
assuming it. Declaring in their reliance on epistolary form their
concern only with “private” matters, women novelists
apparently accepted the necessity of the system from which they
suffered.

Jane Austen, in contrast, understanding letters as voice and as
action, understanding conventions as capable of manipulation,
imagining possibilities of female power within the sphere of the
“private,” playing with reversals of fictional pattern
that adumbrated conceivable social reversals, questioning even the
value of sincerity and its power, envisioning a female character
capable of play and of mastery through play – Jane Austen even
in her adolescent novel experiments with quiet modes of undermining.